A Cautionary Tale for Old Media — Early on, the Mercury News saw the Web threat coming. It's still struggling to survive — On Jan. 19, 1990, Robert D. Ingle, then executive editor of the San Jose Mercury News, wrote a remarkably prescient memo to his bosses at the newspaper chain Knight Ridder.

Student's Ad Gets a Remake, and Makes the Big Time — The idea that you do not have to be a professional to create a good commercial is becoming widespread, in a trend known as consumer-generated content. Leave it to Apple to — paraphrasing the company's old slogan a bit — think differently.

The Future is Cloudy — When Google this week announced IMAP support for Gmail, it really got me thinking about finally outsourcing my e-mail. At $50 per year per address, Google Apps Premier Edition is pretty compelling. For one thing, there are only three cringely.com addresses …

Google's cloud — Google not only wants to hold all our data; it also wants to host all our applications. That, according to Robert Cringely, is the secret meaning behind the recent announcement that Google would be contributing code to MySQL, the popular open-source database.

Mac OSX Leopard: Worth The Wait — The long wait for the latest version of Apple' OSX operating system comes to an end today for millions of Mac fans worldwide. OSX Leopard goes on sale in retail stores at 6pm, although others will receive it earlier by pre-order and courier delivery.

Apple yanks wireless backup from Leopard last minute — To the dismay of what is sure to be many, Apple Inc. appears to have pulled one of the more compelling features of its Leopard operating system last minute: the ability to use its revolutionary Time Machine backup software with wireless AirPort Disks.

Facebook: Committed to the sanctity of the social graph — Just 24 hours after Facebook received $240 million from Microsoft for 1.6 percent of the company, Ami Vora, senior platform manager at Facebook, said that investment news (which probably wasn't any surprise to Facebook employees) wasn't a big deal for anyone she talked to.

Senate OKs 7 more years of tax-free Net access, e-mail — Scarcely a week before an existing ban on Internet access taxes is set to expire, the U.S. Senate late on Thursday voted to let it live on for seven more years. — The compromise bill, which was approved by a voice vote …

The Pirate Bay To Bring Back OiNK — BOiNK will be a little different from OiNK. For instance, the tracker will be public and it will start out with a lot less torrents than OiNK had when it was raided. The success of BOiNK will mainly depend on the former OiNK community, who will be asked to upload their old OiNK torrents.

Yahoo!? — The exclamation mark at the end of Yahoo's official name is beginning to feel ironic. As Google and Microsoft roll up property rights across the web, Yahoo, writes the Economist, "now looks really forlorn": … Ouch. — Earlier this month, Yahoo announced a modest upward bump …

All about Leopard: gallery, apps, impressions — We've been poring over Leopard since getting our copy, and no doubt about it, there's just way too much to say. The number of fixes, updates, and new features in this release is astounding. Granted, many aren't major (and some aren't even …

MYSPACE LOVE$ FACEBOOK VALUE — If Facebook is worth $15 billion, then MySpace is worth $65 billion. — That's the take of RBC Capital Markets analyst David Bank, who applied the $357 Microsoft ascribed to each of Facebook's 42 million registered users in Wednesday's deal …

Sprint Nextel agrees to unlock phones — KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Wireless subscribers of Sprint Nextel Corp. may no longer have to buy a new phone if they jump to a new carrier. — As part of a proposed class-action settlement, the Reston, Va.-based provider, with operational headquarters in Overland Park …